The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
A supplemental item, as used herein, is a data structure that comprises or causes a presentation of information to be shown in coordination with other media content. The other media content may include, without limitation, web pages, electronic publications, and other types of documents. A user will have typically indicated an express intent to view the other media content, such as by opening a document or clicking on a link. In contrast, the supplemental item is typically not expressly requested by the user. An example of a supplemental item is an advertisement, which is a presentation of information intended to persuade an individual to take a particular course of action. Advertisements are often presented within or otherwise in coordination with media content. Other examples of supplemental items include, without limitation, content recommendations, widgets, user-generated comments, and so forth.
A particular category of advertisements described herein is third-party advertisements. Third-party advertisements are produced by a third-party entity (the “advertiser”) that is different from the producer or publisher of the media content. The publisher of the media content will often be compensated by the advertiser, or an aggregator that distributes advertisements on behalf of multiple advertisers, for publishing third-party advertisements along with the publisher's own media content. Other types of supplemental items may likewise be distributed by third-party entities.
Some techniques for distributing third-party advertisements and other supplemental items involve content publishers embedding the supplemental items in “iframe” containers. An iframe container, when interpreted by a web browser, causes the web browser to request and display content from a source that is referenced by the iframe container. For example, a third-party distributor of supplemental items may host a web server from which a supplemental item may be retrieved via a source address. A content publisher may “include” this supplemental item in a web page by referencing the source address in an iframe within the web page. Based on cookies and/or session data automatically submitted by the web browser when the web browser requests the contents of the source address from the third-party distributor's web server, the web server may even track distributions of supplemental items to specific users and/or personalize the selection of which supplemental items to return.
Other techniques for distributing third-party advertisements and other supplemental items may not necessarily involve distributing the supplemental items in iframes. For example, one technique involves inserting supplemental items directly within a “feed” of content items within a content publisher's web page using the same look and feel as the content items within the feed. Examples of this and other “native” advertising techniques are described in, for example, U.S. application Ser. No. 14/095,163, entitled “Dynamic Native Advertisement Insertion,” by Ryan Weald and Michael Jensen, filed Dec. 3, 2013, the entire contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference for all purposes as if set forth herein. Unfortunately, for these and other supplemental item distribution techniques, it is often not possible to track and/or personalize content for specific users. This is particularly true for some types of web browsers on mobile devices. This is also particularly true in the case of tracking a user's behavior across different web domains, even if the same third-party entity is distributing supplemental items on the different web domains.
For example, if an advertiser that uses the “native advertisement” technique described above is responsible for distributing advertisements on both a first web domain published by a first content provider and a second web domain published by a second content provider, it may not be possible for the advertiser to know whether a device that is visiting the first web domain is the same as a device that has already visited the second web domain. Consequently, the advertiser's effectiveness in placing ads across the multiple domains is impaired. For instance, the advertiser may desire to only show a particular supplemental item only once per user device, but have no reasonable way of ensuring that the particular supplemental item is not inadvertently shown to the user device twice—once on each web domain. Similarly, if a user has requested that the advertiser not show a certain type of advertisement to the user's device on the first web domain, the advertiser may not be able to honor the request at the second web domain because the advertiser would not know when the user's device was visiting the second web domain. Additionally, even aside from distribution of supplemental items, there are a wide variety of other contexts in which conventional third-party tracking and/or personalization techniques are ineffective.